Microdrones 'World tour' takes off
The Microdrones sales force is taking its show on the road, engaging in direct, in-depth, face-to-face talks with key user communities and prospective clients all around the world.
Microdrones offers state-of-the-art solutions for mapping, surveying, construction and other geospatial sectors. The company is already familiar to a wide public through its aggressive marketing and past presence at big trade shows like Europe’s InterGEO. Now, with the Microdrones World Tour, the company is multiplying its message through smaller, grass-roots events everywhere.
“We are making a conscious decision, a strategic decision, to put more resources into being at a wider variety of events,” said Mirjam Bäumer, Microdrones Marketing Director for EMEA and New Territories. “We are actually meeting face to face on the regional home turf with industry professionals and companies that are looking for drone-based surveying solutions.
“We are talking about smaller trade shows, events like NYSAPLS and similar shows in the U.S., ‘surveying days’ in different locations— the US has a lot of those. Or it might be the 3-D Forum in the south of Germany or ‘dealer days’ with Optron in South Africa.”
At events like these, you might have fewer attendees than at the big shows, but they often know more about what they are looking for. “We’ve had people come in and tell us about our own products,” Bäumer said. “They may know for instance that our mdLiDAR3000 is a better solution for them and their application. This is very different from what we see at a big trade show, where lots of people might come by but they are not relevant to drone surveying and mapping systems.
“That’s why we’re targeting more local and regional events. Just one example: we were recently at a small event in the Ivory Coast. That’s a country where LiDAR solutions are becoming more prevalent in mining and construction services, and we’re finding increased interest in our solutions. With the big international trade shows, our sales cycle really starts after the show, but at the smaller events, we can often start the conversation with some of the decision-makers.”
Mirjam Bäumer, Marketing Director for EMEA and New Territories.These are face-to-face conversations that we need to have with people, to understand exactly what they want, where they’re at and whether or not they’re ready to come on board and use this new technology. We want to get in front of as many people as possible, sit down and understand their companies, understand their issues, their needs, and speak to them directly.
Local Partners
The World Tour hinges on, among other things, great working relationships with local distributors and dealerships, as well as a whole range of professional and academic organizations.
“We are working very closely with our regional dealers,” Bäumer said. “Partners like our Trimble dealers and Sitech. We like to involve them. Sometimes they go to an event and take us along, sometimes the other way around. We meet a lot of great professionals through our dealers. We’re going to all kinds of user group meetings. We have LiDAR users, photogrammetry survey users, and then there are the public authorities.
“Usually we go to an event with one of our partners, one of our dealerships. We show or demonstrate our system but also give the audience data to look at. There’s a lot of networking involved. And finally you have the universities, academics and students, the research groups. We get a lot of information from these as well.”
The range and variety of Microdrones partners is impressive. “Some of the companies we work with are very big and they’re very diverse,” said Bäumer. “KWS, for example, the German seed company, is someone we work with very closely. They do precision agriculture, detecting crop health, flying multi-spectral sensor systems. So we are doing events with them as well.”
Full Swing
The World Tour officially started last January, and will be assessed at the end of this year. “So far, we’ve been very pleased with the variety of events and the number of professionals we’ve been able to meet,” said Bäumer. “We will continue to develop our network and pursue opportunities for growth.”
“Our sales people are really engaged right now. Sometimes on a given week they may have one of these events every day, and we’re adding new events from month to month, sometimes at the very last minute.”
It’s time to get the word out. The Microdrones World Tour is coming to a town near you. So step right up, it’s quite a show.
To see where the Microdrone World Tour will be next, visit our EVENTS CALENDAR.